Review: Smallville RPG @ Stargazer's World

Hey everybody, my latest full product review, this time of the Smallville RPG is now up and online at Stargazer's as of yesterday.  You should go give it a read.  I found the book to be a very mixed bag; it might be perfect for you, but it also might fall very flat.  It is really going to depend on what you want the game for.  Also, the review brought up a very interesting discussion regarding the focus of RPG's which are based on licensed products, especially TV shows.  Check it out here:  Review: Smallville RPG by Margaret Weis Productions.

Smallville Spotlight - Smallville as a simulation of a Superhero World

Last time, in my Smallville Spotlight, I talked about the idea that all games are essentially a simulation. We also talked about how well Smallville worked as a simulation of the Smallville TV show, from which it was drawn. Today however, I want to take a look at Smallville not as a simulation of the Smallville TV show, but as a simulation of a generic Superhero world.

I have actually heard this game critiqued a lot. A lot of this negative feedback that I have picked up has been from the point that Smallville doesn’t work very well as a game of Superheroes. I think that is a problem. I think the problem here is that people evaluate Smallville not on how well it simulates the Smallville TV show, but how well it works as a Superheroes game. A lot of times, comparing apples to oranges can be a problem, but really, when it comes to this RPG, you kind of have to.

The Smallville RPG is fundamentally an RPG about Superheroes. Clark Kent, and many of the other Leads described in the book, are super-heroes in the making. They will become caped, or masked, crusaders of justice, trying to save the world the best that they can. Although the game mimics and simulates the show, the show is about a Superhero. So, while not all Superhero games may be the apples that the Smallville TV show is, Smallville is fundamentally a superhero game and show. God this is confusing. I remember Bertrand Russell talking about these kind of logical statements in Principia Matematica, but I never thought I would have to bring logic into this.

TL;DR – You need to examine Smallville as a simulation of superhero games as well as a simulation of the Smallville TV Show.

I must say, I think a lot of the people that I have been getting this negative feedback from may be partially right. I don’t play a lot of superhero games, but I do play D&D. Honestly, my D&D characters feel far more super than the characters in the Smallville game. The reason for that is the game is done episodically and with scenes, so while Clark might be running around using his spare time to save people when between those scenes, he is not really able to go whole-hog with all of his powers because of the limitations put on him by the cortex system.

One way I would like to compare this is with the character Wolverine. If I were going to try and play Wolverine in this game, It might be very difficult. Because of the way that you use his regenerative healing, or his super duper claws, there might be times at the table where you actually don’t have the ability to use those powers like you would normally think Wolverine should be able to do. Though I don’t play Superhero games, I have read through a couple rules sets. Because the cortex system kind of puts character powers in the background (at least that is my impression) your challenges aren’t going to try and make you put those powers of yours to creative use, which is something that I think I would really want to do in a simulation of a superhero world.

My viewpoint is this: If I am a superhero and there is a world full of superheroes and we are all in this to snag bad guys and go around saving people, fighting evil villains and what not, than I want to be able to use those powers as much as I can, as long as I am in the absence of my own personal Kryptonite.

BUT… WAIT!!! There is a problem with all of this logic and argument. Should you really be evaluating Smallville as a superhero RPG? “Why yes, Superman is a Superhero, of course we should!” Well, maybe you should, but you should also keep in mind that Smallville isn’t actually a game or a TV show about superheroes. What it is about is the growth of a man, or alien, or whatever, into a superhero. In this game, you are essentially playing the part of that heroes life which is covered in the very beginning of most comic books, or the first 30 minutes of most comic book movies. You are really playing through their origin stories.

I could totally see the Smallville RPG being used to run the story of Peter Parker as he grows up to become Spiderman. During that portion of his life, he has all kinds of drama with the girl next door and has to deal with the pressures of people at school and his aunt and uncle. I could even see using this game up to the point, after Uncle Ben kicks the bucket, and Peter Parker throws on his Spidy Garb and becomes a wicked web slinger. But, after that, once Spider Man is Spider Man, we aren’t dealing in Origins anymore. At that point, we are dealing in stories.

To compare this game to D&D, I would say that you are progressing ever forward to the point where you hit level 30, but in the Smallville RPG, hitting level 30 means you become the hero that you have always meant to be. There are going to be a lot of relationships and drama on the road to 30, and you are going to use your powers (just on the dl). Once you hit around level 29, throw on the red cape and tights and become Superman, you are just about to hit max level, at which point your character becomes renowned around the world and you have to start a new character, who may know about the last PC you ran through the leveling gambit.

So, I will still stand behind Smallville as a simulation of the TV show for which it is named. I will also stand by it as the tale of a Superheroes origin story, whether that be one of the X-men, or any of their Marvel buddies, or whether that be Batman, Green Arrow, or whoever, but I won’t stand behind Smallville as a simulation of life after the mask or cape gets donned. Once you get there, once you are public and everybody knows who you are, I think it might be time to find another game to carry on your character, or even better, start a new one and see how that one grows up too.

Smallville Spotlight - Smallville as a simulation of Smallville

Today, I want to bring up a discussion that I have had with a few people on Twitter recently. The main point of this discussion was regarding simulation in roleplaying games. The blunt of this discussion was regarding dissociation of mechanics in RPG’s. I found the discussion to be very intriguing; the topic, in my gaming, has never really come up. What the gist of this discussion led me to was to some searching into the term, but what it also really spawned was a train of thought in my head, which is now hell bent on evaluating games on a simulation methodology, which is something I want to talk about in this section and the next section of my Smallville spotlight, but not really from the mind-set of dissociation of game mechanics from reality.

Actually, what I want to talk about is how well Smallville acts as a simulation in itself. Since RPG’s are in some respect all just simulations of something, I think it is somewhat important to figure out how well a game acts as a simulation of something, but Smallville is a tricky one for me to deal with. The hang up I am having with the game is trying to figure out exactly what Smallville is actually simulating. The first and most obvious thing that The Smallville RPG is a simulation of is the Smallville TV Show which started on the WB, which later became the CW, and is now running in its 10th and Final Season.

As a simulation of Smallville the TV show, I really think that this game holds up and does a pretty good job. The book itself is cramped full of images from the show, filling it up with glorious photo art. You aren’t going to find many drawings in this one, other than the abundance of charts used to help describe the character creation process.

Beyond the photos, the book brings a significant amount of really awesome stuff from the show, and from Superman mythology, into the game. There are a bunch of great characters which are presented, including art in some places, as well as character bios and statblocks. You get all of the very obvious cast of characters, but there are a lot of characters from early in the shows run which are left out. Many dead characters are brought back to life in the RPG, but many are left out. Dr. Swan (played by Christopher Reeve) did not make it into the characters section. I thought that was a bid odd, but I can deal. I also thought it was interesting how many characters from early on in the show were left out as characters. You don’t get a lot of meteor freaks here (I assume they will come out with the new book which is coming out soonish). I was a bit disappointed to find out that the girl Clark dated, who could teleport through walls, Alicia Baker, didn’t find her way into the book, except for a mention in the season guide…

Oh. Did I forget to mention that a fair amount of the back of the book presents a guide to the TV Show? Yes, it does. Actually, I found this very interesting. If you are going to play D&D in an existing setting, like Forgotten Realms for instance, you are going to want a history of that world and the major players presented in it in order to better paint a map of that world inside your head. Comparatively speaking, a breakdown of all the seasons in a game which is a simulation of a TV Show, is kind of the same thing. I don’t know that I will ever look through this section, unless I am trying to find out which season of the show Clark reveals his secret to who in, but having it for people who don’t own all the box sets might be a very nice thing to have (I own all the box sets… actually, I own 2 copies of season 8 and I have bought season 6, 3 separate times – my first copy I lent to a friend who never returned it and I lost the second copy in a move at some point… stupid college).

One of the other setting specific inclusions in the book is a brief discussion of Smallville and Metropolis, the two major locations for pretty much all of the show. I liked these sections and they definitely merit inclusion in the book, but here is where I am going to throw a big wrench into this wonderful cog of a book…. There is only 2 freaking pages on the actual city of Smallville… I know it is called Smallville and there are not many people who live there (thus small), but 2 pages?? At least half of the show is set there and the name of the show is Smallville, not bloody metropolis… You need to have more description of the book than that, especially in the core book. I know that the show has moved on to metropolis now, but the first half of the series was set there… come on… *grumble grumble*

Moving on for fear of a rant ensuing, I want to talk about how the mechanics of the game can help to simulate the show. At the beginning of this post I talked about mechanics dissociation. I may have mentioned that some people rant about how they hate that 4e doesn’t simulate reality very well. It’s mechanics are highly dissociated from reality. The people on twitter that I talked with don’t fall into the ranting crowd, fortunately, so we were able to have a much more enlightening discussion. But, I think you need to talk about dissocation of mechanics from reality in Smallville the RPG in context with how it corresponds to the show, for which it is a simulation of.

I think this RPG actually simulates the reality that is presented in the TV show very well. The cortex system, which heavily values relationships and skills over superpowers in this game, actually does a great job of simulating how the show works.

In Smallville the TV show, Clark Kent is a young superman. Sure he is running around the city (cus he can’t fly yet) saving people using his super powers, but any time anything of importance comes up, his superpowers always have their foil and their limitations. He either has to hide those powers from someone or he gets zapped with some Kryptonite and has to rely on someone else to save his alien behind. If you actually want to get into power balance in the show, all the characters have their important points and most of them come in useful in some way. Clark isn’t OP. He is just an alien dude, with relationship and trust issues who can see through walls. His powers may be important, but his growth as a man is more the point of the story. He isn’t reaching maturity and becoming superman because he defeats another dude this week and gains some more XP; he is on his path to becoming superman, and will reach the end of that path, by growing as an individuals, developing the ability to trust people and establish real relationships with people (I feel like I should go into some of the developmental psychology I studied in college, but that would be boring).

So, in my opinion, as a simulation of Smallville the TV show, Smallville the RPG works great. I think if your goal for picking up this book is to carry on the TV show in spirit, even though it will no longer be on TV, I think you have a very good baseline to do so.

Smallville Spotlight - Relationship Drama Abounds

If there is anything that Smallville the television series has in abundance, it is relationship drama. Wow. Now that I think about it, there is a LOT of relationship drama. Going back through all the series, it becomes a tangled web of emotions between all the characters. First Clark loves Lana, then he doesn’t love Lana and goes off on a fling with a teleporting meteor freak. Then Lana and Clark fall in love, finally, and Clark has to hid his secret, until she eventually figures that out for herself. But nooooo, that is just the beginning of the drama that goes on with Mr. young man of steel. So much happens in that show that it is almost impossible to keep track of.

I have always been a sucker for super hero relationship drama. I was much more interested in the trials of Spiderman and his experience dating Mary Jane and his other suitors than I was interested in how Spiderman and the green goblin were going to get it on using the same powers they always had. For me, superhero stories that are light on character development and relationships are not ones that I am going to be interested in. This might be why I have never taken to Batman very well. He shut himself off in his little cave and doesn’t really have many meaningful relationship drama going on; the new Batman movies kind of had some going on, but never nearly as much as Superman had.

Superman can stop bullets and catch trains; depending on who is letting him run wild, he might even be able to turn back time (*starts singing the song of the same name*). But, what always limited him the most, more than Kryptonite in all of its shades and colors, were his relations with people: Lana, Lois, Jimmy Olsen, Perry White, Lex Luthor, and all the other long cast of characters which get involved in his life.

The Smallville RPG seems to do a really great job of getting that aspect of the Superhero genre into the game. In fact, I would say that relationships are central to this game, more so that anything else.

In the Smallville RPG, you build your characters as a group developing relationships between the Leads (characters involved) before you even start the game. What most games, especially D&D 4e mostly ignore, or perhaps footnote before the play experience begins, Smallville embraces and centers the entire play experience around. Player Character creation in this RPG is an entirely different style than I have seen most anywhere (though it has some similarities to those found in SotC and Rogue Trader). You start out by mapping your characters path through life in conjunction to the other characters playing the game. This game is not going to be very suited to the lone wolf character who has no emotional ties and no relationships with anyone but him or herself. I found the character creation section to be wildly confusing, but entertaining and interesting. A lot of my confusion cleared up by reading the accompanying diagrams which plot out how all of the characters are linked together and how their relationships mingle, mix, and get messed up.

The game is designed for a group of 4 players and “Watchtower” this game’s version of the GM. What I found fascinating about this setup is that the GM is described as more of a “gardener than a conductor.” The GM is there to facilitate the growth of the players and to allow them to tell their own stories, rather than play through a story setup by the GM. This is pretty much the opposite of everything I play. You could almost describe the entire game as being a great big sandbox adventure. Even the rules are there to back up the fact that you aren’t on a linear rail adventure; this game is more like driving your car through the desert. But, what I found even more interesting than all that was the fact that if you play character creation out through the identity phase, where you essentially decide your character’s destiny, you have essentially put a final destination somewhere in that Mojave desert of a game. What is even more difficult to deal with, mentally for me, is the fact that you are a group of Leads, telling your interconnected stories, but you all have a different final destination in mind for your characters. So, the metaphor descends one step deeper (I feel like I am watching Inception again not writing about Smallville).

The Smallville RPG, to me, is like getting into a mini-van with an assorted cast of Super and not-so-super heroes, driving through the Mojave desert, while each person in the van is a back-seat-driver directing the car to a variety of Final Destinations, none of which are the same. So, yea, there is going to be a LOT of relationship drama in this game. Simply on the surface of the Smallville RPG you have a system which entrenches itself in not only the mingling relationships of the Leads playing, but also has the relationship of a whole cast of other background characters that have varying degrees of interaction and connection to the players… ok. The metaphor is getting lost now. I was going to remark about other cars either following you in that desert, or trying to crash into you, but I am going to leave it at that for the day.

This system intrigues me to no end. I look forward to exploring more of it. Stay tuned. Smallville Spotlight week continues.

Smallville Spotlight - Kick Off

Though I may have never been one for buying comic books, nor have I ever played many Superhero based RPG’s, I am a huge sucker for Smallville. If you have been living in a void for the last 10 years, the TV Show Smallville has been carrying the Superman legacy on while we wait for good, high quality Superman movies to hit the big screen. I can’t say much for the latest superman film (I didn’t dislike it, but I didn’t like it that much either), but I have always been a huge Superman fan. I actually had a custom Superman painted parking spot at my high school (long story). I loved the original movies (at least the first 2 or 3…) and I was also a big fan of Lois & Clark, the New Adventures of Superman while it had its run on the air. But, none of these series, or movies, quite captured my attention like the tales of the young man of steel.

Let my walk down memory road begin….

I got hooked on Superman with Lois & Clark actually. That was a long time ago. I was in elementary school when that was still airing on TV, during the early to mid 90’s. I thought Dean Cain was awesome and I had a major crush on Teri Hatcher, which only got worse when she made her appearance as a bond girl in Tomorrow Never Dies (which is still my favorite of the Bond films from that era). I was infatuated with how devious and vile Lex Luthor was and the storyline where Zod comes back and tries to take over the earth was awesome.

It wasn’t until after Lois & Clark went into reruns that I actually picked up and watched the original movies and it wasn’t until high school that they made it into my list of favorite movies. The reason for that probably has a lot to do with the spot Smallville took in my life.

Smallville came out while I was in the middle of a very tough time in my life. I was sick for a very long time in Middle School, hospitalized many times. The Doctor’s never really knew what was wrong with me, which ended up prolonging that illness for a very, very long time. It turned out to be a fairly common stomach disease, which since then, has been getting much easier to diagnose. Thankfully most people won’t ever have to go through the same troubles I had now that awareness about the disease is out there. That show really helped me get through a pretty tough time in my life. I loved the stories and I felt like I could relate to Superman and all the problems he faced as a high-school student more than any of the other comic book characters out there. Because honestly, I don’t know a lot of other sick kids that really relate to Batman (the X-men came in a close second for me, but they never really captured my visual imagination as much as Smallville has).

In high school, I started buying the box sets and have collected them faithfully since then. I have watched and re-watched some of those episodes more times than I care to talk about here (especially the ones where Clark goes bad… those were awesome…). I just picked up the season 9 box set over Christmas and to get caught up, have finally finished going on a serious binge through seasons 6-9. I must say, I thought the show might slip a bit when Lana and Lex exited the picture (oops, spoiler alert) but honestly, I think the show has only gotten better with time. It kind of makes me wish that Angel had seen a longer run (another show I really, really love, even more so than Buffy the Vampire Slayer). The plots just get thicker and thicker as time goes on and it has been awesome seeing the makings of The Justice League come together.

Unfortunately, Smallville is in its 10th and final season now. It really bums me out. I almost cried when, during the into to season 10 they announce, “Now, the Premiere of the Final Season of Smallville.” I know that the actors need to move on with their lives and that Superman has to finally don his red cape and tights at some point, but something inside me hoped that the show would go on forever.

Oh… wait… It can...

Margaret Weis Productions just so happens to have a Smallville RPG out which they debuted at Gencon 2010. What a coincidence. You thought this walk down memory lane was going nowhere didn’t you??? You can pick up the Smallville RPG at a game store near you, or through Margaret Weis Production directly. Here is a little tidbit of what the game has to offer taken from their site:

“Every hero has a beginning… The SMALLVILLE Roleplaying Game lets you experience all the superpowered action and coming-of-age drama of the hit show on the CW Network. Whether you're struggling against your heritage, your humanity, or your heroic responsibility, you'll need the support of friends and family in order to embrace your destiny. Players may choose to take on the role of Clark, Chloe, Lois, Oliver, or their own original characters in the world of SMALLVILLE.

Easy-to-learn rules and full-color pages bring the show to life for new and experienced gamers alike.”

I just happen to have a copy of this RPG and I will be taking an in depth look at all 216 pages over the course of this week, culminating in a full review of the Game to be posted at Stargazer’s World and around the net. Will it live up to my very, very discerning Smallville standards? This week, we will all find out together. Let my spotlight on the Smallville RPG begin!!